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23 November, 2007

Is it hard to be a hacker? How do I become a hacker? I want to learn more about hacking! Those are the things that I often hear or see on forums. Somebody asked me the other day if I know how to hack a site and whether it’s hard or not. I’m no hacker, I’m just a journalist. However, Petko D. Petkov aka pdp is a world-renowned hacker who in his latest blog post describes how easy it can be for someone with just a bit of skill to hack into military and government sites - .mil and .gov that is.

He won’t give you the tools or tell you where to get them from, but he does explain how easy it is to exploit certain vulnerabilities. He says that the web is full of open CITRIX gateways and while he was performing some CITRIX testing he hacked a lot of GUIs and “played” around with .ICA files. What he found out is that two great tools hackers have at their disposal are Google and Yahoo that can be queried for public .ICA files. After employing this method he was presented with lots and lots of wide open services, some located on .gov and .mil sites. You don’t have to be a genius to tell that this is a bad thing! The .ICAs will give the hacker a lot of info and in cyberspace knowledge means power more than anywhere else!

And here is the most alarming part, as Mr. Petkov writes on his blog: “Just by looking into Google, I was able to find 114 wide open CITRIX instances: 10 .gov, 4 .mil, 20 .edu, 27 .com, etc… The research was conducted offline, therefore there might be some false positives. Among the services discovered, there were several critical applications which looked so interesting that I didn’t even dare look at them. With a similar success, attackers can perform just simple port scans for service port 1494.”

In the same post he hands out a lot of details to prove his concept. You may read it by clicking this link, but keep in mind that this knowledge is for you to better up your website, if it’s flawed, or in any case, you are not to use it for bad purposes.